We must be careful how we throw around the word "masterpiece," and yet it seems entirely appropriately for Brady Corbet's towering achievement "The Brutalist." Years in the making, Corbert's sprawling, nearly four-hour epic is cut from the same cloth (or perhaps I should say chiseled from the same stone) as great masterpieces like "Citizen Kane," "The Godfather," and more recently, "There Will Be Blood." And like those three movies, "The Brutalist" is a distinctly American masterpiece; a story that reflects the triumphs and horrors of the ethereal thing we call "The American Experience." These are stories of great men bursting with wild, potentially dangerous ambition and how they found a way to encase that ambition in the still-developing America of the past, an ever-changing, ever-growing thing impossible to pin down. 

All of Corbert's films are like mock history lessons; biopics for people who never existed, but feel real. His feature debut,...